A Forgotten Freudian

The Passion of Karl Stern

Daniel Burston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429910296
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

This book explores the life and work of a neglected figure in the history of psychoanalysis, Karl Stern, who brought Freudian theory and practice to Catholic (and Christian) audiences around the world.Karl Stern was a German-Jewish neurologist and psychiatrist who fled Germany in 1937 - first to London, then to Canada, where he taught at McGill University and the University of Ottawa, becoming Chief of Psychiatry at several major clinics in Ottawa and Montreal between 1952 and 1968, when he went into private practice. In 1951 he published The Pillar of Fire, a memoir that chronicled his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, his medical and psychiatric training, his first analysis, and his serial flirtations with Jewish Orthodoxy, Marxism and Zionism - all in the midst of the galloping Nazification of Germany. It also explored the long-standing inner-conflicts that preceded Stern's conversion to Catholicism in 1943.

Chapter One
Early years: 1906–1932

Infancy and childhood

Karl Stern was born on April 8th, 1906 in the town of Cham, Bavaria, a predominantly Catholic, rural enclave near the Czech border. The Stern family had lived in the region for centuries, and in generations past, had included many prominent rabbis. Bavaria’s Jewish population dwindled significantly during the mid to late nineteenth century as Jews departed for urban centers around Germany, and so most of young Karl’s friends were from Christian homes. Until the birth of his brother Ludwig nine years later, Karl’s family consisted of his grandfather, his father, his mother and himself. They lived in an apartment above the family business; a store that supplied local farmers and tradesmen with textiles, leather, tools, machine parts and other supplies.

Adolf Stern, Karl’s father, was the eldest of three sons, a man of modest means who worked alongside his own father in the family store. Stern described his father as a man of “natural humility and simplicity,” “the most guileless person I have ever seen,” and occasionally, as extremely naïve. Uncle Felix, the second oldest, trained in engineering and law and moved to Chicago, where he became quite wealthy. Though seldom seen in Karl’s formative years, Felix was a regular

Figure 1. Karl Stern, one year old.

correspondent, sending greetings and news of his own growing family several times a year (Stern, 1951).

Figure 2. Moritz Stern, Karl’s grandfather.

By contrast with Felix, the lawyer and engineer, uncle Julius was a bachelor in the printing business. Julius was often home for Passover and short, impromptu visits, and was remembered by Stern as his grandfather’s favorite son, despite his socialist leanings. Julius was younger than Felix, read widely, and travelled the world on business, sending his fond nephew postcards from exotic locales, and regaling him with stories about his travels in India, France and North America. As Stern recalled: “It seemed somehow extraordinary that he, my father’s brother, supplied Chinese merchants in Ceylon with perfume labels, and that in his suitcases were literary reviews from Paris” (Stern, 1951, p. 20). By his own admission, Karl’s accomplished uncles struck him as almost “mythological” figures, rendering his father’s modest station in a life a source of some embarrassment. So it is probably no accident that Stern’s most vivid childhood memories concern his grandfather, his mother and cosmopolitan uncle Julius.

Stern described his grandfather Moritz as a local personality who joked freely with children, customers, and friends, but was also as a strict disciplinarian when circumstances required. Though not a rabbi, Stern’s grandfather led Sabbath services and holiday prayers in the local synagogue—a modest room rented above a local brewery. By contrast with his grandfather, Karl’s parents were somewhat permissive, and quite distant from Jewish tradition. Neither his father or mother knew Hebrew, so on the rare occasions they prayed, they recited their prayers by rote; a fact that Stern’s grandfather accepted without complaint.

Figure 3. Ida and Adolf Stern.

Christmas and Chanukah are festivals that frequently coincide or overlap, so every December, Ida Stern, Karl’s mother decorated a Christmas tree in the store to celebrate the season with the family’s friends, customers, and employees. And each December 5th, following Bavarian custom, his grandfather dressed up as St. Nicholas to distribute gifts to children in the neighborhood. Evidently, the idea of a Jewish community leader dressing up as Santa Claus did not strike anyone—including their Christian neighbors—as incongruous or inappropriate, and the intriguing oddity of this situation did not even dawn on Karl until he was eight years old.

Meanwhile, during these seasonal festivities, Karl often went to friends’ homes or local Churches, where Christian iconography was prominently displayed. Moreover, at his mother’s instigation, Stern attended a local kindergarten run by nuns. So, as he himself observed:

[…] my first religious education was Catholic. We had no catechism but we were entertained with stories from the Bible, particularly from the New Testament, which were illustrated with colored pictures on the wall. There was also a little prayer now and then. I must have been impressed by the pious atmosphere. I have only vague recollections of the stories, pictures and […] our Christmas play, in which I had a role. (Stern, 1951, p. 24)

When Stern started public school, the next phase of his religious education was entrusted to a local Cantor whose name he did not remember, but whom Stern described as “hateful.” As World War I approached, the nameless Cantor was drafted into the Army, to be replaced by a several equally forgettable tutors, until the arrival of Cantor Mohrmann, who had an intemperate fondness for cards and late nights, but imparted a real love of music to his young charges.

While his memories of kindergarten were vague, Stern’s recollections of public school in Cham were colorful and distinct. The overwhelming majority of students were children of poor farmers or tradesmen. His first elementary school teacher was a gentle giant named Kaspar Russ—an extremely shy, extremely musical, and devoutly religious man. A fervent fan of Wagner, he was nevertheless fond of Jewish children, several of whom, including Karl, received their first musical instruction from him. Karl’s early education was also imbued with the love of nature and literature, imparted by the head teacher Herr Gradl, who led

Figure 4. Karl Stern as a pre-schooler.

Figure 5. Karl Stern and a childhood friend.

the school children on lengthy excursions “through the vast meadows of the Regen valley” to collect botanical specimens, and read Schiller’s poetry—and occasionally, his own—when they were well behaved.

On December 5th, 1915—the Eve of St. Nicholas—old Santa Claus failed to show up on cue. Instead, Karl was ushered into his parents’ bedroom to greet his younger brother Ludwig, named (for some obscure reason) after the mad King of Bavaria. By all accounts, Ludwig bore a startling resemblance to his older brother, and though Karl did not realize it at the time, his younger brother’s arrival severely taxed his mother’s delicate health. To lessen the domestic burden on Ida Stern, Karl was sent to a boarding school in Ebenburg, not far from Cham, the following year. From this point onwards, young Karl would live most of the year away from his parental home, only returning on holidays (Stern, 1951, pp. 31–33). Whether he realized that Ludwig’s arrival and his banishment to boarding schools were connected—and if so, what sense he made of this state of affairs—is unknown.

In any case, Karl’s experience in Ebenburg can be summed up in three words—lonely and boring. He and two older boys, Leo and Alex, lived on the second floor of a dismal, mouse-infested building. A dreary synagogue was downstairs, and on schooldays, they attended a school across the road. Stern described Ebenberg as “a drab industrial town,” and the religious instruction he received there as perfunctory and formulaic. “There was hardly anything left of the world of Isaiah—just a little establishment for circumcisions, funerals and for singing prayers on certain days” (Stern, 1951, p. 33). Looking back, the best thing Karl could say about Ebenburg was that it enabled him to appreciate the medieval charm of his home town—which he had hitherto taken for granted. Now vacations, spent at home, seemed like “furloughs in heaven.”

At eleven, Karl went to school in Munich, where he fared better. He lived with the Kohens, an orthodox Jewish family. The head of the household, “good, tiny Frau Kohen,” was a widow of modest means whose children were slightly older than he was. The Kohen home was suffused with a warm, pious atmosphere that enchanted Karl, and for the first time in his life, he experienced the Passover seder as a moving and meaningful ritual. At synagogue services, Stern prayed alongside orthodox Jews, and was quite moved by their fervor, which contrasted starkly with the eclectic, episodic and often lackluster observances back home. In his own words:

There is a famous story told by Perez of a Rabbi and his disciple who, while slowly starving to death, discuss Talmudic problems,

Figure 6. Karl Stern as a school boy.

with red eyes and glowing cheeks; these types really exist, I have seen them. (Stern, 1951, p. 42)

Living in Munich also afforded the eleven and twelve year old Karl undreamt of opportunities to visit theaters, museums, operas, parks, and churches. Thanks to Kaspar Russ, Stern had already heard his share of church music, and had found some of it quite beautiful. But now he thrilled to Mozart’s Magic Flute and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. He would later comment that

[…] there is nothing like it in the history of art. It is as if you beheld European man, a late estranged European man, already half cut-off from his moorings, just once more stirred in his heart by an experience of infinite importance. (Stern, 1951, p. 39)

As music opened up new spiritual horizons, Karl started to shed his naïve egocentrism. Suddenly, he recalled:

I was at the age during which children develop the spiritual organs of empathic perception; i.e. at the age when for the first time the strange neighbor in the streetcar becomes a feeling human being, a person who has the same eyes, the same sense of smell, the same brain, the same sensations as myself. It is the age during which the range of sympathy suddenly extends far beyond those nearest to us, in fact it runs for some time the danger of cosmic dilution. (Stern, 1951, p. 44)

“Cosmic dilution” is an odd turn of phrase, and obviously intended to convey how disquieting the suffering of others suddenly became for him. Stern’s abrupt awakening also sensitized him to the horrors of World War I; a process catalyzed in part by Uncle Julius. While on furlough from the front lines, Julius praised a book called Le Feu, by the Marxist author Henri Barbusse. After reading Barbusse, Karl felt that “scales had dropped from my eyes.” He suddenly grasped the senseless depravity of war:

[…] the dirt of the trenches, the rain, the snow, floods, rats and corpses, the death of so many […] human beings whom I might have known personally, and it was a fact that innocent human beings killed one another. The fact that all these people could just as well have been friends was the most stunning insight. (Stern, 1951, p. 44)

Whom did Stern blame for this state of affairs? A “murderous clique of capitalists and industrialists” who conspired to keep peasants, workers, and artisans at one another’s throats, so they would not unite and overthrow the greedy profiteers, who whipped them all into a nationalistic frenzy. And so twelve year old Stern started reading about Marxist martyrs like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and Martin Buber’s beloved friend, Gustav Landauer, the pacifist anarchist murdered by Nazi thugs in 1919, mere days after Stern’s Bar Mitzvah.

Looking back on this period of his development, Stern was struck by the confluence of religious piety and revolutionary fervor that suddenly animated him as his Bar Mitzvah approached. Religious piety and revolutionary fervor are often opposed, on the face of it, and a striking feature of Stern’s subsequent development was the way he attempted to synthesize and reconcile these two tendencies in himself. In all likelihood, the intense emotions Stern experienced in his early teens marked the onset of an adolescent “identity crisis”: a search to find his own voice, and to define his evolving sense of self through his religious and political commitments. According to Erik Erikson, the successful resolution of an adolescent identity crisis requires that adults provide the budding teenager with adequate time and space to explore and experiment with different roles and identities—a “psychosocial moratorium” that enables the young person to discover and refine the ideas and ideals he or she will embrace in the next phase of the life-cycle (Erikson, 1958; Erikson, 1964; Burston, 2007). Sadly, Stern’s environment was not really suited for this purpose, and the inner turmoil provoked by his spiritual search was not really resolved till his conversion in 1943, when Stern was thirty-seven years old.

Meanwhile, young Karl’s Bar Mitzvah was profoundly disappointing. As Erikson noted, rituals designed to mark significant milestones in human development should have an extraordinary, even numinous quality (Erikson, 1964). But on the day of Karl’s Bar Mitzvah, the boy who preceded him on the bima—the podium were Torah is chanted—could not read a word of Hebrew. In fact, he was barely able to recite the preliminary prayers and benedictions. Stern was somewhat better prepared, and when his turn came, chanted a competent

Figure 7. Karl Stern approaching Bar Mitzvah.

haftorah portion from Ezekiel on the resurrection of the righteous, or more precisely, of their dry bones, on the Day of Judgment (Ezekiel 37: 1–14). The basic theme of this passage is collective renewal in the face of overwhelming tragedy; the idea that even in the face of death and devastation, the righteous can trust God to renew and restore His people.

To those conversant with the Prophets, this passage is very potent stuff, and has enormous resonance for Jews and Christians—and even to secular Zionists, who interpret it allegorically—to this day. But no one in the congregation that day was particularly moved or interested in his rendering of Ezekiel. When Karl arrived home, he received some jocular teasing from his relatives, and conventional gifts like the collected works of Schiller and Kleist, and books on polar expeditions and life in far off Tibet. Though he did not say so in quite so many words, the sense of familial indifference to (and estrangement from) his ancestral faith could not have been more pronounced. And to underscore the pervasive cultural anomie, after dinner, Stern’s cousins insisted on playing a theme from Wagner’s Valkyrie on the piano (Stern, 1951, Chapter Four).

Adolescence

Shortly after his Bar Mitzvah, Stern developed a lively interest in various German youth movements. Though differing widely on questions of race, religion and politics, as Stern recalled, these groups shared two basic characteristics: their members spent considerable time roaming fields and forests, and shared a more or less articulate antipathy toward the older generation, especially their fathers, whom they tended to blame for all the evils of modernity.

After mulling over his options, young Karl Stern joined a rather amorphous outfit called “Jung Judischer Wanderbund” (Young Jewish Wanderers) that catered to a diverse cross section of middle-class Jewish youth. With the passage of time, several members of his youth group became committed Communists or Zionists, but as Stern later recalled, most of his fellow wanderers remained decidedly noncommittal. He was the only one who turned to religion while still active in this group. Indeed, in the middle of his fourteenth year, Karl began to rise early to recite the traditional morning prayers, and put on the traditional prayer shawl (talit) and phylacteries (t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• A NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS
• CHAPTER ONE Early years: 1906-1932
• CHAPTER TWO Psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and politics: 1932-1935
• CHAPTER THREE London to Montreal: 1935-1949
• CHAPTER FOUR The Pillar of Fire: 1950-1955
• CHAPTER FIVE Through dooms of love: 1955-1967
• CHAPTER SIX A legacy lost: 1968-1975
• CHAPTER SEVEN Freud, faith, and phenomenology
• CHAPTER EIGHT A Hebrew Catholic
• CHAPTER NINE Judaism and Catholicism in Stern and Lacan
• AFTERWORD
• REFERENCES
• INDEX